The requirements of the Prosecutor's Office are absolutely illegal and we will appeal against them. We consider that the situation is completely unacceptable as we have to pay these illegally imposed fines instead of spending this amount of money on saving lives, protecting people from HIV and preventing drug overdoses.

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation distributes sterile needles to people who use drugs on the streets of Moscow. Now they are facing the Ministry of Justice which is accusing them of being “foreign agents”. Ivan Varentsov explains the case.

This week, an HIV epidemic has been officially declared in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, where the health department estimates 1 out of every 50 residents is a carrier of the virus. The government has been hesitant to recognize that Russia is experiencing one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics.